Joseph Harper faces the ghosts of a childhood past, and the difficulties of touch-screen gaming, in an iPhone port of Oddworld staple Munch’s Oddysee.
Ah, another week of sneaking into the toilet at work so I can play a game on my iPhone. This week I played Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee. To be honest, it’s kind of nuts to me that there is an iPhone port of this cool game. iPhones are actually pretty advanced, I guess. I used to have a Gameboy emulator on my old Android via cool illegal jailbreaking technology so have previously experienced the joy of playing real games (Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! Worldwide Edition: Stairway to the Destined Duel) on a phone. But this is pretty next level. Munch’s Oddysee was an original Xbox launch title! FFS!
I used to love the Oddworld games. I played the first one in primary school with my friend Joe Ellis. Joe sold his guinea pigs in the Buy, Sell and Exchange, to buy a Playstation then got it modchipped by some dude in Sumner. So he had lots of games. Abe was very cool and weird. The weird animations, the overt Marxist undertone, the “Follow me”, that soothing wololo type noise he made, and that it had a button that made him fart. All great features.
I played the original Munch game a few times when I was ~15. I bought an Xbox after saving my KFC earnings, but after about a week I hated the massive alien-skull-like controller so much that I sold it off to a friend and used the money to buy an air rifle. So this is a pretty new experience for me. The internet seems to reckon it’s a helluva port though.
It was a real delight being re-acquainted with the odd world of Oddworld. At $6.95, it’s a decent bargain. The game looks pretty sweet and is full of the good weirdness. Plenty of unhinged characters, highly creative puzzles and surprisingly riveting action (bearing in mind that Oddworld protagonists all move like a baked orangutang).
The controls take a bit of an adjustment period because an iPhone screen is small and there are quite a lot of ‘buttons’. But once you get into it, Munch’s Oddysee is very fun. Come for the nostalgia, stay for the brilliantly munted world and coolness of a 3D platformer on a smartphone. Also, it’s undoubtedly the best game in the market about fishing quotas in an alien dystopia.
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